Hard as it may be to remember right now, as Donald Trump slowly descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City in June 2015 to announce his presidential bid, his candidacy was considered a laughing stock. He was running ninth in a crowded race for the Republican nomination - well behind Jeb Bush, the ultimate establishment pick. Trump, a mere celebrity businessman, wasn't given a chance.
Trump's campaign was a mess. He was incoherent, unpredictable and often outrageous. Yet his willingness to shock won him headlines and a loyal following. His random improvisations made him fascinating to reporters who were used to hearing the same tidy talking points.
And Trump was impossible to pin down. Whereas his opponents consulted their focus groups in an attempt to triangulate an acceptable line of attack, Trump would simply change the subject. When under fire for his crude schoolboy mockery of a disabled New York Times reporter, for example, he took to Twitter to criticise the "dopes" at the Times for making bad merger decisions. Rivals and journalists alike were left looking ponderous. The mess was working.
A few months into the primary campaign, a friend emailed me with a comment about Trump: "He's inside their OODA loop".
I knew what he meant. We'd been discussing the art of winning the messy way, and both of us were fans of a military guru and US fighter ace named John Boyd. His "OODA loop" is an acronym describing the process of "observe, orient, decide and act". Boyd argued that disorienting your opponent provided the ultimate strategic advantage.
But here's the thing about Boyd's approach: it means accepting that things will get messy. It requires swift, opportunistic manoeuvres. That means snap judgements. Errors are inevitable. You and your colleagues will get out of sync with each other: synchronisation, said Boyd, was for watches, not soldiers.
Once you start thinking about using disorientation and sheer awkwardness as a strategy, you see it everywhere. As the UK pondered a referendum to leave the European Union, the Vote Leave campaign spilt acrimoniously, with some pushing a xenophobic pulling-up of the drawbridge, others a buccaneering embrace of deregulation and free trade. The chaos worked: Eurosceptic voters tuned into whatever message they preferred to hear, and the Remain campaign didn't know who to try to refute. Against the odds, all advice and every mainstream political party, the Brexiteers, as we now know, won.
What works in politics can work in the ring, too. Rocky Balboa switched from an orthodox to southpaw to become champion of the world. If you prefer a non-fiction example, Tyson Fury did much the same thing when he took Wladimir Klitschko's WBA, WBO and IBF heavyweight titles late in 2015. It was yet another victory in which the underdog triumphed not by fighting skilfully, but by forcing his opponent to fight clumsily.
"Wladimir looked bad because Tyson Fury made him look bad," said one pundit at the time. But a messy win is still a win.
It turns out that Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, also embraced the messy road to success. His philosophy was simple: scramble to grab as much territory as possible - first books, then toys, then tablets and cloud computing. The result was years of chaos inside Amazon as the company kept embracing the next impossible challenge before conquering the previous one.
In the web's early days, the conventional wisdom was that established retail players such as Barnes & Noble would crush Amazon.
Bezos disagreed. He explained his thinking in a talk at Harvard Business School just a few months after Amazon had launched. Students told him that he should sell Amazon to Barnes & Noble - a business with more than a hundred times his revenue - before he was wiped out.
Bezos told them not to underestimate corporate inertia. Amazon might be a mess, but it was fast-moving. The big players were disoriented. Bezos remained convinced that as long as he kept going, his competitors would hesitate. He was proved right.
We live in a world that admires care, planning, consistency - but recklessness, improvisation and incoherence can work too. 2016 was a year of winning messily; get ready for 2017. It's time to stop underestimating the power of mess.
Tim Harford is the author of Messy: How to be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, out now
The WIRED World in 2017 is WIRED's fifth annual trends briefing, predicting what's coming next in the worlds of technology, science and design
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
